Kelly Wilson ported the Gnash Flash player clone to Syllable [screenshot], enabling the playing of Adobe Flash content. It uses the Boost C++ libraries, the SDL and Anti-Grain Geometry libraries for graphics rendering and FFMPEG for multimedia decoding. Work on the player is continuing to add the FreeType library and make the player native to Syllable, so it can be integrated in the web browser. Also, on some Adobe Flash news, an upcoming update will be supporting native h.264 videos, HE-AAC audio support, as well as hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback.

You must understand that it's not always possible to dig into existing stuff. The original project might be bloated, stupid or just have plain wrong implementation (from YOUR POV). This is why there's so many OSS implementations + the fact that there's no marketing boss shouting "competition is going to walk over us so let's cut it".

In the end it's beneficial, see compiz fusion..

It's sometimes best for all parties to work their way, and then perhaps see the merits of each to unite later.

So I think it's pretty good resource management. In closed source world, you'd drop the second project developers and that'd be the "dump resource management". Now at least they aren't lost.